


Vampire War AU Extras

by hobbitdragon



Series: Witcher Fics [11]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Families of Choice, Gen, Vampires, World Hopping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-15 10:42:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28687311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hobbitdragon/pseuds/hobbitdragon
Summary: Assorted scenes in the same 'verse as my longfic, The Blood That Ended the War. It'll be marked as complete with every scene posted, since they each stand alone.
Series: Witcher Fics [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1731811
Comments: 23
Kudos: 65





	Vampire War AU Extras

Ciri barely knew how to even describe what happened the deeper they went in the cave. She'd been to many worlds, but she'd never before seen a place that was _broken_ in this way. Something essential had torn open during the first Conjunction and had healed together all wrong like a badly-stitched wound. Water flowed upward, the path they were walking on curved around the walls, and the floor became the ceiling. She wondered if, given time, she could pick it apart and reshape it how it ought to be. 

But the cave itself wasn’t the problem for which she and her Elder were here. She stole a glance at her Elder, whose eyes shone in the darkness just like Geralt’s. Encouraged by those familiar eyes and the gentle look on the Elder’s face, Ciri kept going. 

When a small corridor opened out into a massive darkness, the Elder moved in front of her. The Elder called up into the darkness in Rasna, and a furious, grinding voice called back. Ciri bowed, head down and one hand out, as she had been taught. 

By the time she’d straightened, the Midlands Elder stood in front of them. 

He could not have been more different from Ciri’s Elder. Where her body was rich and soft, his was gaunt and miserable-looking. He had the same scarification that Ciri’s own Elder had, the same pendant, but his skirt was tattered and so old that whatever color it had once been was lost to time. And his skin was a sickly corpse-like grey that was, Ciri realized, probably how Geralt imagined his own skin must look. 

The Midlands Elder hissed another few sentences, gesturing angrily at Ciri. But her Elder stood between them, quietly responding, until at last the Midlands Elder subsided, eyes settling on Ciri in silent rancor. Then Ciri’s Elder turned to look at her too. 

“He doesn’t believe you can do it,” Ciri's Elder explained. “He’s furious at me for disturbing him for what he believes to be a lie.”

The other Elder let out a low, warning growl, like an unfriendly dog when someone unwanted was standing too close. 

“What will happen to all of those in his flock?” Ciri asked then. Until now it had never occurred to her to ask.

Her Elder shrugged. “They will come south to me, or go North, or cross the Blue Mountains. It is their choice. They have gone without proper guidance for so long they may not fully realize what they have been missing.” Her dark gaze fell heavy on the Midlands Elder, who bared his teeth at her, before turning again to Ciri. “Some of them will look for you," the Elder continued. "They will want to return home as he does.”

Ciri nodded, seeing that this was her cue. She closed her eyes, feeling into the resonance of this place, the little fragments of another place that had broken in and gotten trapped here. She felt the resonance of the Midlands Elder himself, and her own Elder, the way their essence moved and sang at a slightly different pitch than everything around them. 

“I’ll go alone first,” Ciri explained to the Midlands Elder. “To see if I’ve found the right world. I'll be right back for you.”

She focused. Then with a kind of pop, she moved between worlds. 

She stumbled as she landed, the hard floor of the cave under Beauclair replaced with thick moss. But this moss wasn’t green, it was lavender, shading into a deep purple in some places. Huge trees--or, well, not trees, exactly--towered above her. Ciri moved toward the closest one and laid her hand on it. As soon as she touched it, she realized why it looked so strange--it was not a tree, it was a gigantic fungus, with frilly, branching fronds that intersected and grew into the limbs of all the other fungal trees around it high, high above her. She could smell the damp, mushroom smell of them now that she was thinking of it. 

Further up the trunk of the nearest one, a colony of bats chittered at her, several startling into the air at her sudden appearance. Or batlike creatures, rather--Ciri had looked at diagrams of bats in zoological texts in Cintra and Kaer Morhen, and these were not bats as she knew them. They were a lovely pale shade of yellow, with long tails that curled into tight spirals and forked tongues that darted out as they looked at her. 

“Sorry,” she told them, wincing little at their sharp cries. 

She was fairly sure this was the right place. The Elder had described it to Ciri over several evenings running, the different biomes in which she might find herself and the creatures she might see there. By the quality of the light, she thought that the forest might have a border nearby. She walked in that direction. 

She quickly turned out to be right. The mushroom-trees fell away, petering out quickly into a rocky landscape that stretched as far as the eye could see, all of it furred and softened by the purple moss. Above her, four moons hung in the sky, two of them far closer than the moon in the world of her birth. And in the vast plain below, she saw some of the creatures that her Elder had described to her--the prey animals that _tiur-ziva_ hunted in groups. 

They were huge, easily twice the size of the merchant vessels in Novigrad’s harbors. They looked rather like Geralt’s drawing of the gold dragon he had once met, except they had six legs rather than four and a pair of wings, and their necks and limbs were vastly long and flexible like those of herons. Their backs were covered in sharp spikes and their bellies glowed from within. 

The nearest one, some thirty yards away, turned to look at her. Its six eyes narrowed at the sight of her. Several of the smaller creatures on its back and sides, moving in among its spines, took flight, swooping around her and shrieking like birds defending their nests. 

“All right, all right,” she sighed. “I’m not bothering your host.”

Satisfied that she had the right place, she pulled herself back to her own world. She caught her Elder’s eye and gave a confirming nod. 

“It was as you described,” Ciri said. “Is he ready?”

The Midlands Elder fixed his bitter eyes on her, mouth twisting into an expression of furious distrust. But Ciri’s Elder nodded. 

“Take him home,” she commanded.

With a nod, Ciri held out her hand. The Midlands Elder took it with clear disgust.

Well, he needn't touch her for long, Ciri thought, and pulled them between worlds. 

When they arrived, the Midlands Elder--or, well, the vampire who _had_ been the Midlands Elder for a while--stood very very still for several seconds. His nostrils flared as he drew a deep breath, eyes darting back and forth in their deep sockets as he looked all around. Then he knelt, pushing his claws through the moss and deep into the earth below. 

For what felt like a very long time to Ciri, he simply sat there, breathing and swaying gently. Then she realized he was letting out a low, keening noise, so soft it was almost beyond human hearing. 

“I take it this is the right place,” she said, voice quiet. 

“My home,” he rasped out, in halting and heavily accented Nordling. _“At last,_ my home!”

Ciri nodded. She gave him a moment longer, in case he decided he needed anything else from her, before she thought that he should be given privacy instead. 

“I’m going back,” she told him. “I may bring some of your kindred some time later.”

He did not respond, staring into the fungal trees at the movement of the bat-creatures. After another breath, she left him behind. 

She went straight to her Elder, wanting to be held. Her Elder embraced her, the ceremonial pendant cool against Ciri’s chest and her body soft against Ciri’s arms. 

“I can smell our home on you, see it in your mind,” she murmured into Ciri’s hair. She sighed. “It would be so easy to ask you to take me there, too.”

“Do you want to leave?” Ciri asked, unable to keep the note of distress from her voice. She had already lost one grandmother, she did not want to lose a second. But she had to offer.

“Maybe someday,” the Elder replied. “But not now.”

Nodding, Ciri withdrew from the embrace. They had work to do, now, in telling the others. They had to get home to Nilfgaard.


End file.
